Poster #204 - Children’s Attention and Sad Facial Expressions in Relation to Their Kind and Selfish Emotions

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Why do some children feel happy about violating ethical norms while others feel bad? According to prominent social-cognitive and social-emotional theories, the ways in which people process social transgressions impacts their subsequent emotions (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Malti, Dys, Colasante, & Peplak, 2018). For example, children who attend more to other-oriented cues versus self-serving cues tend to report more kind and less selfish emotions (Dys, et al., 2018). But, some theories also posit that shifting one’s attention allocation will only cause changes in their finalized emotional response insofar as it alters the way in which they evaluate ethical transgressions (Malti et al., 2018). How people evaluate ethical transgressions is typically reflected in their facial expressions (Moors, 2013), which can be observed in real-time (Ekman, 1977). Here, we focused on sad expressions which children show most commonly in response to ethical transgressions (Dys & Malti, 2016). Thus, we tested whether 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds’ attention allocation (to other-oriented versus self-serving cues) and sad facial expressions were related to their kind and selfish emotions. We also examined whether these associations were moderated by age. We controlled for gender due to previous findings linking gender with kind emotions (Malti, Gummerum, Keller, & Buchmann, 2009).
We tested these questions with an ethnically diverse sample of 130 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds, from a large Canadian city. We played children a hypothetical vignette depicting pushing and stealing from a previously validated measure (Malti et al., 2009). During the vignette, we used eye tracking to calculate our attention allocation score, subtracting the percentage of time children attended to the self-serving cue (i.e., stolen lollipop) from the time they attended to the other-oriented cue (i.e., victim’s face). We used validated facial expression recognition technology to score the average intensity of children’s sad facial expressions during the vignette. After each vignette, we asked children how they would feel if they had done this and why, and coded their responses as kind, selfish, or other.
Using path modeling (see Figure 1), we found that children’s attention allocation was unrelated to their kind or selfish emotions (respectively, β = .09, p = .34; β = –.14, p = .12), while children’s sadness was positively and negatively associated with their kind and selfish emotions (respectively, β = .22, p < .01; β = –.13, p < .05). Furthermore, the interaction between sadness and age predicted kind emotions (β = .17, SE = .05, p < .01). Simple slopes analyses (see Figure 2) revealed no effect of sadness on kind emotions for 4-year-olds (β = –.09, p = .52), but positive effects for 6- and 8-year-olds (β = .24, p < .01 and β = .57, p < .001, respectively). All other interactions were not significant. These results substantiate the theorized relations between children’s attention allocation and evaluations of ethical transgressions in relation to their finalized emotions. We will discuss these findings in relation to our developmental model of children’s kind emotions and highlight implications for efforts to promote social-emotional development.

Authors

• Sebastian Paul Dys, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Tina Malti, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author